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Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Duchess: Do, as a concession to my poor wits, Lord Darlington, just explain to me what you really mean.
Lord Darlington: I think I had better not; nowadays, to be intelligible is to be found out.
—Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
TOPICS
• The Process of Clarifying
• The Principle of Loyalty
• The Principle of Charity
• The Straw Man Fallacy
Clear arguments are arguments that can be evaluated. But arguments in everyday life are often lacking in clarity; so before you evaluate an argument, you will be asked to engage in the process of clarifying. This chapter is concerned with the clarifying process and with two principles that regulate it, the principle of loyalty and the principle of charity.
3.1 The Process of Clarifying
If you are preparing to evaluate an argument, the first order of business is clarifying. This means you should make sure the argument is expressed as clearly as possible, so that it is as easy as possible to tell whether the premises are true, whether the logic is good, and whether the argument is relevant to the conversation. Clarifying requires two procedures, performed at the same time: outlining the argument in standard format and paraphrasing the argument.
3.1.1 Standard Clarifying Format
As we saw in Chapter 2, when an argument is expressed in ordinary English it is not always obvious which statement is the conclusion and which statements are the premises. The standard clarifying format that we use in this text provides a simple way of making it obvious which is which. When an argument is outlined in this format, the premises (including any premises that may also serve as subconclusions) are numbered and listed immediately above their conclusion, while the main conclusion is indicated
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not by a number, but by C, for Conclusion. (This provides a simple way of referring to the elements of the argument in your evaluation.) All conclusions—including subconclusions if the argument is complex—are preceded by ∴ in the left margin.1 Implicit statements are enclosed in square brackets, but otherwise treated like all other statements in the argument.
Standard Clarifying Format
1. Premises numbered above their conclusion.
2. Main conclusion identified as C.
3. All conclusions (main conclusion and subconclusions) preceded by ∴ in the left margin.
4. Implicit statements in brackets.
Consider this modest argument from the Miami Herald:
Dade County, which includes Miami, is the best place in America to be a criminal. It has the nation’s worst crime rate and does the laziest job of putting criminals behind bars.
Once we have identified the conclusion (the first sentence) and the premises (each half of the second sentence), it can be painlessly put into standard clarifying format, as follows:
1. Dade County has the nation’s worst crime rate.
2. Dade County does the laziest job of putting criminals behind bars.
C. ∴Dade County is the best place in America to be a criminal.
That’s all there is to it.
Let’s take a slightly more complicated example. Can subliminal messages in rock music have an effect on the listener? Anthony Pellicano, a forensic audio specialist, testified for CBS Records in the case against rock band Judas Priest. He gave this argument:
The volume at which alleged auditory subliminal sounds are produced is not loud enough to cause the eardrum to vibrate. If the eardrum does not vibrate then the message cannot be sent to the brain. “The subliminal argument has absolutely no basis in fact,” Pellicano concluded.
Here is the argument in standard clarifying format (with minimal paraphrasing).
1. Another common way of designating a conclusion is to draw a horizontal line between the last premise and the conclusion. This leaves no simple and clear way, however, of indicating subconclusions if the argument is complex.
1. The volume at which alleged auditory subliminal sounds are produced is not loud enough to cause the eardrum to vibrate.
2. If the eardrum does not vibrate then the message cannot be sent to the brain.
C. ∴The subliminal argument has absolutely no basis in fact.
This outline makes plain which statements are the premises—1 and 2—and which is the main conclusion—C.
Suppose Pellicano, the forensic audio specialist, had finished his remarks with the following additional assertion:
So Judas Priest is innocent.
We would then outline the entire passage as a complex argument, as follows:
1. The volume at which alleged auditory subliminal sounds are produced is not loud enough to cause the eardrum to vibrate.
2. If the eardrum does not vibrate, then the message cannot be sent to the brain.
3. ∴ The subliminal argument has absolutely no basis in fact.
C. ∴Judas Priest is innocent.
The revisions are highlighted. Note that 3 is now a subconclusion; as such, it is not only the conclusion to 1 and 2, but it is also the premise for the new main conclusion, C.
This does not completely clarify the argument. Note that the arguer clearly is inferring from premises 1 and 2 that the message cannot be sent to the brain—and that this is the immediate reason for his assertion that the subliminal argument has no basis on fact. If we include that implicit statement—as a subconclusion—the outline takes the following form.
1. The volume at which alleged auditory subliminal sounds are produced is not loud enough to cause the eardrum to vibrate.
2. If the eardrum does not vibrate, then the message cannot be sent to the brain.
3. ∴ [The message cannot be sent to the brain.]
4. ∴ The subliminal argument has absolutely no basis in fact.
C. ∴Judas Priest is innocent.
Revisions are again highlighted. There are other implicit premises in the argument (you might think for yourself about what might be implicitly assumed between 3 and 4), but this is enough to illustrate the format. This format sets the stage for evaluation of the argument, which should follow.
Guideline. Outline each argument in standard clarifying format.
EXERCISES Chapter 3, set (a)
Outline each of the following arguments in standard format. There is no need, at this point, to attempt to paraphrase or supply implicit statements. Don’t assume that every sentence in each passage is a premise or conclusion.
Sample exercise. “For a scrapbook of the Truman senatorial campaign, Fred Canfill kept clipping the local papers along the way. One item dated August 3, from an unidentified paper, acknowledged that Judge Truman was no orator, but then this was an argument in his favor since there was already too much oratory in the United States Senate.”—David McCullough, Truman
Sample answer.
1. Judge Truman was no orator.
2. There was already too much oratory in the United States Senate.
C. ∴Judge Truman was the better candidate in the senatorial campaign. (Paraphrased from the expression “in his favor”)
1. “When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn’t even get Dallas.” —Richard Lewontin, New York Review of Books (Stick to clarifying here—resist the urge to evaluate this as a good or bad argument.)
2. “‘The real object of sports writing’, says a friend of mine who does it, ‘is to keep readers away from the horrors in the rest of the paper.’ Thus sports continues its rounds as the Magnificent Evasion, since it also keeps us away from the bad news at home and in one’s own
psyche.”—Wilfred Sheed, Harper’s (Look for more than one premise here—inference indicators are there to help you.)
3. “Japanese still tend to think in terms of personal relationships and subjective circumstances in their business dealings. Thus an agreement between a Japanese and a foreign businessman should be reduced to its basic elements, and each point thoroughly discussed, to make sure each side understands and actually does agree to what the other side is saying.”—Boyne De Mente, The Japanese Way of Doing Business
4. “Says Buntrock of Chem Waste, ‘We’re waste managers, so we have to help our customers manage their waste. So if the business moves from a quantity function to more services and processing, we’ll move with it.’”—Forbes
3.1.2 Paraphrasing the Argument
It is usually necessary for you to paraphrase the argument at the same time you are organizing it into standard clarifying format. This means that, to achieve clarity, you must reword the argument, highlighting what matters most in determining the merits of the argument—in determining whether the premises are true, the argument is logical, and the argument is conversationally relevant. Why is this usually required? There are at least two reasons. First, arguers often find it hard to make themselves understood, despite the best of intentions. And, second, their intentions are almost always to do more than merely to make it easy to evaluate their reasoning. They almost always have a rhetorical purpose as well; that is, they intend to persuade.
Rhetoric is aptly defined by W. V. Quine in Quiddities as “the literary technology of persuasion.” It can help or hurt the argument’s clarity. It helps when it is used to make good arguments easy to accept on their own merits. But it hurts when, as Quine puts it, those who use it place “the goal of persuasion above the goal of truth . . . , disregarding every discrepancy while regarding every crepancy.” In this chapter and the next three, you will find dozens of examples of the use (and misuse) of rhetoric. Your aim in paraphrasing should be to get rid of what is incomprehensible or misleading, whether intentional or not, so that the only thing that could be persuasive about the argument is the quality of the reasoning.
Guideline. Paraphrase each argument for greater clarity as you are outlining it in standard clarifying format.
Procedures in the Clarifying Process
1. Outline in standard clarifying format.
2. Paraphrase for greater clarity.
3.2 The Principle of Loyalty
When clarifying an argument it is essential that you be guided by the principle of loyalty, which says that your clarification should aim to remain true to the arguer’s intent. This principle does not say that you should feel fondness for the arguer or that you have any obligation to try to defend the argument. It applies before you decide how much you like the argument; its point is strictly to ensure that the clarified argument you go on to evaluate is the arguer’s argument.
Let’s look at a simple example in which a paraphrase achieves greater clarity, but at the same time violates the principle of loyalty. Forbes magazine describes a group of New York University economists who set out to find out how our spending patterns would be affected if we had absolutely no way
of knowing what our income would be or what the interest rates on our credit cards would be. The economists argued for the following conclusion:
If the income and interest rate processes are sufficiently stochastic, then consumption eventually grows without bound.
For those of us who are not professional economists, this needs some clarification. Forbes lightheartedly chides the economists for their obscure writing and suggests that their conclusion really amounts to the simple truism,
The more you have the more you spend.
The Forbes paraphrase is definitely clearer. No doubt about it. But there is a new problem: it isn’t the authors’ conclusion any more. Stochastic, as used by the economists, means unpredictable. So, despite the obscurity of their prose, you can see that they are not talking about consumers who have more and more income, but consumers who don’t know what their income will be. A more loyal paraphrase, then, is this:
The more uncertain you are of how much you have, the more you spend.
This, too, is clearer than the original. But it has the additional virtue of capturing what the economists seem to have had in mind. It is their conclusion, and thus accords with the principle of loyalty. In sum: it is a good idea to paraphrase when it clarifies the point—but not in such a way that it changes the point.
Guideline. In your clarification, remain true to the arguer’s intent.
3.2.1 The Arguer over Your Shoulder
A useful book on writing style by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge is titled The Reader over Your Shoulder. Its guiding principle is this: always write as though the reader were peering over your shoulder, insisting that everything you write be easily understood. We can adapt this advice for our purposes: when you clarify, always imagine the arguer over your shoulder. That is, clarify as though the arguer is always there, looking over your shoulder, insisting that you stick with the point, ready to say, “No, no, that’s not at all what I had in mind.”
When you fail to do this, the results can be uncomfortable. Note this retort from one of the great philosophers of our time, W. V. Quine, to a lengthy critique of some of his views by one of the great linguists of our time, Noam Chomsky:
Chomsky’s remarks leave me with feelings at once of reassurance and frustration. What I find reassuring is that he nowhere clearly disagrees with my position. What I find frustrating is that he expresses much disagreement with what he thinks to be my position.
Of course, when arguers are unclear they must bear some of the blame for a disloyal rendering of their
views. Still, we must do our best to ensure that the argument we are evaluating is indeed the arguer’s.
Imagining that you are under the watchful eye of the arguer can serve to keep you in line.
Guideline. Imagine that the arguer is looking over your shoulder to ensure that your clarification is true to the arguer’s intent.
3.2.2 Consider Both What the Arguer Says and What the Arguer Does Not Say.
An obvious way to find out the arguer’s intent is to note carefully what the arguer says. This focuses your attention on logical implication, or what we sometimes informally call the literal meaning of the sentence. The logical implications of a statement are those things that absolutely must be true if the statement is true; if they were not true, there would be no imaginable way in which the statement could itself be true. Suppose you call me on the telephone and I almost immediately say to you, “I’m already very late for a meeting on another part of campus.” Some of the things logically implied by this remark are:
I’m already very late for a meeting on another part of campus.
I’m on campus.
The campus has more than one part.
The other meeting is scheduled to have already started.
These are simply part of what I mean by the words I have used.
There are, however, many related things that could be false even if the statement is true; thus, they are not logically implied. These include:
The meeting has actually already started. (Everyone could be late, for example, or the building could be locked.)
I plan to attend the meeting. (I could be late even if I intend to be absent.)
I am expected at the meeting. (It could be open to everyone on campus, and thus perhaps no one would miss me.)
Logical implication surely does not cover all that I intend to communicate to you by my remark. This leads to a less obvious piece of advice: note carefully what the arguer does not say. This focuses your attention on conversational implication—what I want you to believe, over and above the literal meanings of my words, when I express a sentence. You draw these implications on the basis of broader customs that we all follow that govern the use of certain sorts of expressions under certain circumstances. Normally if I say to you when you call, “I’m already very late for a meeting on another part of campus,” what I’m most concerned about letting you know is,
I can’t talk to you right now.
This is no part of the literal meaning of the terms I have used—that is, it is not logically implied. Rather, it is conversationally implied. Based on your experience in a lifetime of conversations, you realize that I
would normally have no reason to tell you that I was late for a meeting unless I wanted you to understand that I could not talk to you right now.
Suppose, to provide another example, I recommend that you write a friend of mine to ask her advice about a job. You ask for her address and I reply, “It’s somewhere in Dallas.” You immediately understand that I intend to communicate the following:
I do not know her exact address.
This is not a logical implication; it does not follow from the meanings of the terms I have used. But you instinctively understand that, under these conditions, I surely would have given you the exact address had I known it. My reason for not giving it to you must be that I did not know it.
Note that conversation is used here broadly to mean an interchange of ideas, whether spoken, written, or thought. Obviously, something I say to you in a face-to-face dialogue is part of a conversation. But in the larger sense of conversation, something I write in this book is also a part of a conversation, since it is aimed at a certain audience that I hope will understand it and react to it in certain ways.
To provide an example of written conversational implication, in the 1920s newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was out to make the mayor of New York look bad. So Hearst planted a reporter for his New York newspaper, The New York American, to slyly ask this question at a mayoral press conference:
“Mr. Mayor, Mr. Hearst wants to know if you have a corrupt motive in supporting the Remsen Gas Bill?”
The angry mayor ejected the reporter, and was further enraged to see this headline in the next day’s New York American:
Mayor Does Not Deny That He Has A Corrupt Motive In Supporting The Remsen Gas Bill.
The headline is literally true and does not logically imply anything that is false. But the conversational implication is that the mayor admits that he has a corrupt motive in supporting the Remsen Gas bill. And this is indeed false. Note that since conversational implication is another means of communicating, it is another means of lying.
Figures of speech—rhetorical devices—are especially noteworthy in considering conversational implication. They include cases in which conversational and logical implications actually conflict with one another, and conversational implication wins. (It must always win, since what you are clarifying is always the use of a sentence in a particular conversational setting—and the broader conversational context is what I, as the speaker or writer, use to indicate my intentions in using that sentence.) If I say, “Her mind is a steel trap,” one of the logical implications is that her mind is a mechanism made out of steel that opens and closes and is designed for catching animals and not for thinking. In most conversational contexts (except for, perhaps, a bizarre piece of science fiction) this is so obviously false that you instinctively realize that I could not intend it, but that my real, unspoken, intent must be to draw attention to important similarities between her mind and a steel trap. So, in cases of metaphor such as this, it is only the conversational—and not the logical—implications that capture my intentions.
In Chapter 2 we covered sentences that are not in statement form—questions, commands, or even fragments, for example—but that nevertheless function as statements. Oh to be at the beach this afternoon! for example, though in the form of an exclamation, in many contexts also serves that same function as the declarative I want to go to the beach this afternoon. This is a further example of